


Anodyne

by JeanSouth



Series: Android!verse [2]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M, android!au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 03:47:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/756692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanSouth/pseuds/JeanSouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kise passes away. Aomine misses him too much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anodyne

**Author's Note:**

> in the same verse as verisimilitude.

“I will give him back to you,” Akashi promises. “He’ll look like Kise.”

Aomine did like Kise’s face. He had pretty, soft lips that made Aomine ache to kiss them. His arms were sun-bronzed skin over corded muscle. Once, he had strolled from the bathroom to the bedroom for the very first time fully naked, and Aomine wonders how he didn’t go blind looking on the visage of an angel.

“He’ll sound like Kise,” He continues, with his white lab coat buttoned up neatly, and plans drawn up and pinned on the board behind him. They look complex, with artificial lungs and an artificial heart to pump artificlal blood through veins that don’t exist.

And his voice was the first thing Aomine ever heard. He’d never seen him around campus (or if he did, he never noticed him), and a year passed him by in blissful ignorance. Kise called out to him; impossibly sweet, cheerful, with a strict undertone of awe that wouldn’t leave him for a good few years.

“He’ll even act like him.” Akashi vows, with the somber kind of tone one is expected to adopt with a spouse who has outlived their lover. He folds his hands together behind his back, and watches like before him is the grandest of experiments. 

But that’s the part Aomine can’t believe. Because no computer-made brain-chip will know how Kise refused to eat peas in his rice, how he always stopped to stroke dogs walking down the street, and was hopelessly addicted to a low-grade fashion show full of hideous outfits (and how his enthusiasm, bright and overflowing, got Aomine to like it too).

There are no circuits sophisticated enough to read his mind, and learn how when Kise kisses, he leans a little to the left, and his hands fist in the sheets like he’s trying to box Aomine in and keep him close.

“Okay,” He agrees though, because those are the things he cannot live without. It’s waking up in the morning to find the blankets unruffled, and the bathroom void of facecreams and expensive soaps that smell like wildflowers. It’s these things that make him seek Akashi out, and offer up his wishes. “Please.”

It is the first time he pleads, and he intends it to be the last. He’s present for the assembly. At first it's just a rack, with a rough metal skeleton that holds room for fake organs that could have saved lives. He feels selfish. He stares down its empty eyesockets, and can’t think of the man he loves. The blood in its veins is gruesome, but does not match the dysphoria when it gets its face. 

It has no expressions, and its eyes are flat.

“Hello,” It tries, and its artificial intelligence is not programmed yet. It looks at him with the blank indifference of a stranger, and does not care for his obvious discomfort. Akashi takes it away.

“It’s disgusting,” Aomine says to him, and buries his face in his hands and rubs his eyes until the tips of his fingers have made a mess of his hair. The air smells like motor oil and cheap office coffee. “It’s nothing like him. It’s just a bunch of parts thrown together.”

From the lab next door, Kise’s face watches him above a skeleton made of metal.

The next time he sees it, it has skin. When he arrives it’s off, and only looks like it’s sleeping. When he touches it the skin feels soft, real, and he can’t find the part where it was stitched up, even though he tries. He doesn’t look inside the hospital-esque gown it’s wearing, too afraid to see what’s there.

“Hello,” It says again, when the lab is empty, and it’s terrifying that it’s woken up. This time, it has Kise’s voice, but it moves like a toy he had as a child. “Are you visiting me, Daiki?”

Its voice is painfully hopeful, like the multitude of pleas for one-on-ones and trips to his shows. He feels like he’s choking up again, and it reaches out for him until its clumsy fingers curl around his wrist. They feel cold with warmth seeping in, like he’s been out playing in the snow too long, and wants to tug him out to see the angels he’s made.

“Yes,” He manages, but his voice breaks a little. He coughs, trying to sound more stable. “I am.”

He gets a smile for that, but Kise’s power cuts. He slumps forward, into Aomine’s arms, and is plugged in when Akashi returns. Eventually he’ll run without it, drawing power from the very air itself, but for now he has a cord that leads to his arm. Like a hairdryer, or a kettle, and it makes Aomine want to throw something, because he doesn’t want to think of it as a he.

It takes only three days after that to fix the power supply, and make his joints run as smooth as they should. He dunks a basketball for Aomine’s enjoyment.

“Call me if you have any problems,” Akashi offers, kind as you please. Kise links their fingers together on the way home, and stops in at a supermarket for slim cuts of delicious beef and some things to make a sauce. At home he prepares it with stunning accuracy.

“Open wide,” Kise teases him with a piece of beef in his chopsticks and a hand under it to catch the drips. He eats some too, and without thinking, Aomine encourages him to eat more. It earns him a strange kind of smile, until he’s suddenly too aware of the softness of the couch under him, and the smell of vegetables in the air. He gets up to open a window, and look out at the night sky.

Behind him, Kise is warm and wraps arms around his waist, rests a chin on his shoulder and breathes in deep.

“I wish we could see the stars properly,” Kise laments, and one hand waves towards the sky. The night sky should be dark, but it just looks a deep, sickly yellow in a mirror of the city underneath it. “Maybe we should go to the country.”

And it’s a nice offer, bright and quiet and gentle, but Kise hates the country and the slow, dreary solitude.

“Sure,” He agrees though, because he’s been on holiday once by himself, and something is better than nothing. He’s squeezed tight in a moment of joy, and teeth nibble his ear.

When they pack, Kise does it neatly, and doesn’t take suncreams and facemasks. It’s surreal. He makes the metal detectors go off at the station and they have to call Akashi.

“I don’t think this is working out,” Aomine says, four days into the trip, with a lapful of cat that lives in the isolated cabin. Kise looks content. He shouldn’t; there’s no one looking at him here, and no one who admires him. “I really don’t.”

Kise goes from content to sad to angry, and leaves to the bedroom. After the door slams it’s quiet until he finds the courage to push it open and sit next to him on the bed.

“I want to live,” Kise says, sounding tired and unhappy. He twists a ring around his finger; he holds no memory of the time Aomine bought it for him. He doesn’t remember the drapes they picked together, or the onesie he bought Aomine as a joke for christmas. He’s not really Kise.

“I wish you’d lived too,” Aomine replies, and the crushed expression on Kise’s face is enough to drive him from the room; to motivate him to call Akashi. They’re on a train home in no time, in the same lab as before, but another metal skeleton hangs from the ceiling. Kise sits on one of the tables. His fingers curl around the edge.

“Do you want to do the honours?” Akashi asks him, and the question sounds sardonic. A lot of work went into Kise, he remembers hollowly.

“No.” The reply is final; he thinks of Kise in a hospital bed. “I pulled the plug once already.”

Akashi does it instead, with a scalpel that reveals the off button; it would be comical if he weren’t quite so distraught. The cuts hurt not-Kise, and he cries. Aomine cries with him.

“Aominecchi,” He manages out, but the last of it sounds mechanical as he stops working altogether. He slumps backwards, like he’s getting comfy in a carseat. It makes Aomine feel sick.

“I thought you said you could give him back to me,” He says, feeling like a raw wound that won’t stop bleeding, but he doesn’t know where to apply the stitches.

“I did,” Akashi places a hand on his shoulder. “But prosthetics are never the same as a lost limb.”


End file.
